A Generic Construction for Efficient and Secure AKA Protocol in 5G Network

Abstract

The 3GPP has designed the authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for the 5G network to overcome the security deficiencies found in (Evolved Packet Service) EPS-AKA protocol of Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) network. However, the existing 5G-AKA protocol is vulnerable to several attacks such as impersonation, man-in-the-middle, and denial of service attack. The identified protocol vulnerabilities would enable an adversary to impersonate the legitimate mobile user and the serving network. In addition, the communication entities incur high computational overhead. In this paper, we propose the generic construction for efficient and secure AKA protocol in the 5G network. For the correctness of the protocol, the formal verification is carried out using the AVISPA tool. In addition, the security analysis illustrates that the protocol fulfills all the security requirements and is secure against the known attacks. Moreover, the performance evaluation of the protocol shows less communication and computation overhead during the AKA process of 5G network.